Polygon
KotakuLatest Reviews
The care present in Ghost of Tsushima’s design makes its undercooked take on its own ideas harder to forgive. Take its themes seriously, and it becomes a story about a feudal landlord learning that maybe life isn’t about him, but centering on him anyway. The Jin Sakai that players engage with through play — the Jin Sakai that composes haikus, loves animals enough to play them little tunes on his flute, who never met a row of bamboo he did not want to cut for fun — seems to have the interiority that the Jin Sakai of Ghost of Tsushima’s narrative does not. One is a thoughtful guy you might want to hang around. The other is not. He’s kind of embarrassing.
Genre is mostly bullshit. It’s useful for discussion and for imagining where a certain game exists on the continuum of innovation and progress. These discussions are important, and for them, we need genre. But genre doesn’t do a lot for games, especially once they start to borrow from each other, forcing us to come up with new genres to collect them under. Genre can never really keep up.